Future-Oriented Ideology: Abundance

An Image of the Future for the Practical Left

I decided that I had better get on board and read the book of the summer, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. This has been the latest and most prominent salvo in an ongoing slow-motion battle over the future of the political Left, which today seems good at riling people up but really bad at winning elections or changing society. At one point it even played a role in the New York City mayoral primary. You may not have heard of all this discourse, in which case you clearly spend less time than I do around highly online, aggressively middlebrow intellectuals¹.

But is this Futures content? Recall that one of the drivers in the slow-motion decay of the capitalist system, according to Andy Hines, is an Ineffective Left. Inasmuch as the Abundance Agenda could win more votes than identity politics, which path we take next as a society may depend on the outcome of this debate. Also, the book intentionally uses the pull of a possible future to create support and momentum for its orientation.

The Barriers to Abundance

The argument is pretty straightforward, but a little lengthy so buckle up. The United States, as it has matured, has become sclerotic and struggled to produce enough of the core elements of a good life: housing, education, transportation, and healthcare. As these things have become scarce, the government’s response has been to stimulate demand - housing vouchers, Pell Grants and student loan guarantees, etc - and artificially direct our limited supply toward those seen as more needy/deserving - affordable housing mandates, rent control, EMTALA, etc - both of which further the experience (and narrative) of scarcity². Instead, government should radically reorient around increasing supply.

Vibrant, affordable cities are the key to growth and opportunity. To keep growing, the boundaries to building housing, especially the requirement to assess environmental impact of private construction, and restrictive zoning and housing code laws (mandating not only what kinds of buildings go where but also rising standards for housing), need to be revisited and in many cases repealed³. Fundamentally, the idea of home ownership as a reliable way to grow wealth is incompatible with housing being affordable, and we’ve made the wrong choice over the last 50 years.

Cheap energy is the economic foundation for building more of the things we need, so making carbon-friendly energy sources cheaper and easier to build is critical⁴. But America’s system of democracy-by-lawsuit is a giant brake, adding time, cost and uncertainty to every project, from housing to transportation to energy. These regulatory frameworks were set up to protect the air and water, but they are blocking the projects that would create sustainable, clean energy⁵. Plentiful, clean energy makes things like vertical farming, desalination, and Direct Air Capture practical, all of which take pressure off existing land, water, and air resources. Regulations have accumulated for decades, almost all advancing a worthwhile goal, but without acknowledgment that each one imposes a cost. The net effect is to make government either ineffective at getting work done efficiently or actively standing in the way of the private sector.

To continue to grow in wealth, we need not only to build more of what we already know, but things that don’t currently exist. The first step of this is invention. The US has a vast network of government-driven research, but progress is slowing down, due to issues with the pipeline of scientists and bias toward “safe” research due to scrutiny on anything without immediate practical implications. The often overlooked second step is translating inventions to societal scale, which is often a process of finding and removing bottlenecks. Some government approaches (promising to buy a good product early in its life cycle) spur this work along, while others (such as loan guarantees) act to subsidize failure. Interestingly, the authors observe that it often takes a crisis to create the focus needed to quickly invent and scale solutions; compare Andy Hines’s finding that shifting to New Equilibrium was a shorter path to Transformation than a full-blown Collapse — maybe a New Equilibrium is a crisis well met, and Collapse is a crisis that spins out of control without an effective solution⁶.

The book’s overall advice for a new/refocused movement on the Left:

• Belief in government only makes sense if government actually “works”; fix that (or at least have a plan, instead of reflexively defending bad government outcomes against attack from the Right) and then ask people to vote for you

• Prioritize outcomes over process; cities are filled with people living in tents because it’s impossible to build boardinghouses, apartments under a certain square footage or without parking, etc

• For every problem, ask yourself: could this problem be fixed by increasing supply? If not, why not? If so, what’s the most effective way to do it?

Images of Abundance

The book opens with a vignette of a 2050 driven by abundance. It’s a familiar grab bag for long-time readers of this newsletter: vast amounts of clean energy, desalination solving water scarcity, vertical farming and cultivated meat creating food with a much smaller footprint, space medicine, drones, and a shorter workweek due to automation. To map this set of ideas to Andy Hines’s After Capitalism images⁷, Klein and Thompson lean 90% into Tech-Led Abundance, with a few nods to ideas in the Circular Commons and Non-Workers Paradise images. That dominant image is agnostic to whether the institutions of capitalism remain, and indeed throughout Abundance there is no call for nationalizing industries or taking any institutional steps that don’t have strong precedent in American history, nor is there a strong discussion about what to do with all the garbage created by all the things we’d be building. Notably, chapter 2 specifically calls out degrowth as a strategic dead end that promises to save the earth by making everyone miserable through politically impossible policies, setting itself against much of the organizing logic of the Circular Commons image.

The book is 200 pages, 5 chapters, and breezes by (especially if you’re on the clock because you need to write about it). Based on my work last semester, I wonder if we’re too far into a Dream Society orientation around performance and image to enact a serious, directed policy agenda, but pay attention to signals that these ideas are being taken seriously, whether in national races, state legislation, or public comment at City Council meetings.

1. And I love that for you.

2. Scarcity, in turn, drives ugly politics, with identity politics driving hoarding of resources; the current right-wing flavor of this is natural citizens vs immigrants, and the Left’s is current homeowners against developers, businesses, and new arrivals.

3. Noah Smith gives probably the most straightforward explanation I’ve seen for why building housing makes housing more affordable, even if the built units aren’t legally “affordable”.

4. This includes both building massive amounts of new electricity generation and new appliances, vehicles, etc that run on electricity rather than fossil fuels.

5. Even government incentive programs act like a poison pill, piling on so many requirements and delays that it effectively stops projects from progressing.

6. And anyway, as Klein and Thompson note, part of leadership is in defining and galvanizing a response to a crisis.

7. Yes I intend to do this all the time now, thank you for asking.